Secondary home management with Home Assistant

When you get caught up in smart homes you can’t stop and want to automate everything. I started with the second home in the mountains and then got caught up. In this post I want to collect my experiences in managing the second home, specifically with Home Assistant. The big problem is that the LTE router doesn’t have a public IP address and I have to leverage a VPN to access the second home’s network from the outside. Continue reading

Install Guacamole on Docker with Traefik and 2FA

Note I finally found how to get Wake on LAN working from Guacamole in docker, check out this guide. Note If you want to install Guacamole with postgres database check out this guide. Remotely accessing an SSH terminal or graphics session with VNC/RDP can be very useful. Particularly if you have a lot of devices and if you regularly change your workstation. Guacamole is one of the open source solutions on the market. Continue reading

Esempio mutual TLS con Traefik

Many configuration guides for SSH server suggest eliminating the login with a username/password and replace it with a key. More and more I use this solution in my small home environment. A day on Twitter I have seen this tweet and I have made some tests with mutual TLS (or mTLS). 🇫🇷 Community Contribution 👉 Sécuriser #Traefik avec du mTLS by Romain Boulanger https://t.co/TofOPAYVYC — Traefik Labs (@traefik) March 26, 2021 I find mTLS really helpful when you cannot use a VPN, for example on an enterprise pc or due to some firewall restriction. Continue reading

My experience with Home Assistant

A letter from Swisscom arrived two years ago and created a problem for the management of the heating of the house in the mountains. Because they informed us of the termination in end of 2020 of the GSM or 2G (old generation telephony) service. The current modem in the control module installed 7 years ago is not compatible with 3G or higher and therefore needed to be replaced. But with what? Continue reading

SSO and 2FA for Traefik and Docker containers

Note I used Authelia for a while, but I had the problem with some services. I suggest you use client certificates (mTLS) instead and follow this guide. In my last vacation day’s just before the car trip to go back home. I have read this tweet about traefik. Google OAuth with Traefik - Secure SSO for Docker Serviceshttps://t.co/QjGA6b7Tn3 pic.twitter.com/ussXNNBzko — Smart Home Beginner (@smarthomebeginr) June 3, 2020 The guide describes the use of OAuth for securing Docker containers. Continue reading

Traefik 2.x examples

TLTR On GitHub you can find a repository with some examples of traefik (version 2.x) configuration. You find the docker-compose and the guide on how to use this. Feel free to report the issue if something is not working. Intro I have no trouble saying that I am a bad developer (no problem is not my work). In my home network, I play with some systems. For 2-3 years I experiment with docker and my container number it’s growing every month. Continue reading

Back to the Future? Or to the past?

I’m not much of a site developer and I have no problem admitting that. I just like having a space where I can “crawl” and share what I do. A website doesn’t create itself and when you get down to it, the problems increase exponentially. You can create it based on freely available platforms (where of course you are the product because they have to make money) like WordPress, Blogger and many others. Continue reading